editorial comment Spending on prevention and education? Are you crazy??? That could actually work. We are not trying to win anything here, buddy.......

People with the sniffles and the druggists who stock sinus medications may be the ones who pay for Michigan's fight against the illegal manufacture of methamphetamine. The cold pill ingredients ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are used to make meth. The Michigan House overwhelmingly passed two bills last week aimed at making it more difficult for meth makers to get the cold pills they need. If the state Senate approves and Gov. Jennifer Granholm signs the measures, people under 18 years old couldn't buy the sinus medications. In addition, stores would be required to lock up the common drugs, keep them under the counter, or otherwise control access to them. It's easy to understand why legislators are anxious to enact these laws. Meth is a monster drug. It's speed - crystal, crank, ice - with a rush that can kill. It leaves many users craving more, and more and more. But requiring stores to restrict the sale of one ingredient needed to make meth is an inadequate response to the problem. It would inconvenience a huge number of Michiganders. After all, who hasn't sought the relief of these pills when a head cold hits hard?

By hook or by crook, the people who cook up meth will get what they need to make the stuff.
They'll shop from store to store until they get the hundreds or thousands of pills that they need.
That's quite likely what meth makers do now. Even without the proposals that the House passed last week, anyone coming up to a store counter with an armload of cold pills is going to draw unwanted attention. Or they'll steal cold pills, just as they sneak into farm yards for another common ingredient, anhydrous ammonia.

In fact, cold pills aren't even needed to make meth.

In 1980, restrictions were placed on other chemicals used to make meth with a different recipe.

Now, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are just the easiest means of cooking up a batch of an illegal drug that has been around for a long time.

In the 1940s, the Nazis supposedly fueled some troops into fighting frenzies with meth.

In the 1960s, counter-culture poet Allen Ginsberg called methamphetamine the "Frankenstein drug" for its unpredictable, and deadly, nature.

Some may remember the old anti-drug message. "Speed kills." It was aimed at meth.

Education and drug treatment are the primary approaches the state should take against meth.

It's that, or also strictly regulate the long list of common household chemicals that, along with cold pills, are used to make meth these days.

Legislators need to gather their political will and fund drug education campaigns and treatment centers that have gotten short shrift for many years now.

That's the legislation we'd like to see.

Not these half-cures that inconvenience a huge number of law-abiding people who just want some relief from their sniffles.

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